Between 600 and 500 BC ‘Periplous’ of Himilco, the Carthaginian, made the earliest documentary reference to Ireland. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BC, wrote of an island called Ierne which lay at the edge of the continent, and stated that it was discovered by the Phoenicians. The sister island was known as Albion. These names had come to the general knowledge of Greek geographers such as Eratosthenes by the middle of the third century BC. Ierne in Phoenician would mean the “farthermost” island. Between 330 and 300 BC the Greek geographer and voyager Pytheas, in his Concerning the ocean, gave us the earliest reference to the British Isles, calling them the Isles of the Pretani (Pretanikai nesoi), probably an indigenous name, the meaning of which we will never know. The name of the island of Islay is of similar pre-Indo-European origin.  The ‘Pretani’ are thus the most ancient inhabitants of Britain and Ireland to whom a definite name can be given. As there is no evidence of any major immigrations into Ireland after the neolithic period, the Pretani would appear to be the direct descendants of the earlier peoples, or at least a dominant segment within the native population. In the later Irish literature ‘Pretani’ would become ‘Cruthin’.

Ireland was now to encounter a significant group of immigrants — the “Celts” — who were to bring with them a new and rich language. We cannot be certain as to when the first groups of “Celtic” people arrived in Ireland. To this day, there is no evidence which can place “Celtic” settlements in Ireland before the first century AD or the first century BC at the earliest. The once-popular notion that the “Celts” were in Ireland from time immemorial has long been discarded, though some academics with Gaelic nationalist sympathies, including archaeologists,  continue to state otherwise. Another popular belief, however, that the “Celtic” immigrants, when they did arrive, swamped the local inhabitants and became the majority population, has proven harder to dislodge. Yet it is now generally accepted that when those groups of peoples we loosely call “Celts” arrived in Ireland, they did so in small numbers. A seminar held by the Irish Association of Professional Archaeologists in 1984 acknowledged that any “Celtic” ‘invasions’ were more than probably carried out by numbers “far inferior to the native population(s)”.

Archaeologist Peter Woodman has also pointed out: “The gene pool of the Irish was probably set by the end of the Stone Age when there were very substantial numbers of people present and the landscape had already been frequently altered. The Irish are essentially Pre-Indo-European, they are not physically Celtic. No invasion since could have been sufficiently large to alter that fact completely.” Popular notions, particularly when they are interwoven with cultural pride and romantic ideas of a nation’s ethnic identity, make it difficult at times to permit new awareness from percolating into public consciousness. While this is forgivable for the general public, it is harder to understand why some academics and media presenters still talk today of the Irish as being a ‘pure’ Celtic people, despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary. Although they had come as a minority, however, the Celts eventually achieved a dominant position in those areas that came under their sway, and they formed a warrior aristocracy, wielding power over the mass of indigenous inhabitants.

To be continued